The desire to represent reality, either internal / psychological or external, is an instinctive impulse based in Man's innate desire to create. The journey from representations of the figure or landscape, to those of pure abstraction can be considered a hallmark of modern and contemporary art (at least in the context of Western art history). While the paths to an abstract representation of reality are myriad, the approaches to abstraction can be distilled down to two main themes:

Abstracting an external reality,
and,
Abstracting an internal reality.

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